Evangelicalism is spreading quickly among the Chinese of South-East Asia

WHEN Pastor Jimmy Parade took over at Indonesian Reformed Evangelical Church in Bandung, on the island of Java, five years ago, around 180 people came to services each week. Now the church—in a nondescript building in an outdoor shopping complex—is packed with around 450 each Sunday. “People keep coming,” Mr Parade shrugs.

Some 1,000 miles away, up several sets of escalators at a shopping mall in Singapore, thousands of people take part in a two-hour service on a Saturday evening at the City Harvest Church, which has a weekly attendance of just under 16,000. The service involves a rock group leading the congregation in devotional songs, several instances of speaking in tongues, and testimony from Emily, a young Singaporean who converted her father to Christianity. “My Dad has become a much happier man,” she declares, to huge applause.

Evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity is growing more quickly in Asia than most parts of the world, with over 200m adherents in 2015, up from 17m in 1970. The largest congregations are in South Korea and the Philippines, where dazzlingly large mega-churches hold tens of thousands of people. But Christian zeal is also increasing in other parts of the continent, including Indonesia and Malaysia, where proselytising among the Muslim majority is well nigh impossible, but where Buddhists, Confucians and Christians of other denominations, almost all of them ethnically Chinese, are proving receptive.

In Singapore, which is sandwiched between Indonesia and Malaysia but is mainly Chinese, evangelicalism first took off in the 1980s, recalls Terence Chong of the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute, a think-tank. Mega-churches began springing up in the early 1990s. These grew quickly, despite the fact that the Singaporean government is wary of proselytisers

I think the growth of Christianity in China is pretty well documented, although some (or all) numbers are approximations. Overseas Chinese are another very large group ripe for evangelization, often by Chinese missionaries from mainland China.

Communist China has been officially atheist for several generations. Any religious missionary is looking at a population that has been denied a spiritual life, and many of them desperately want one.

My brother lived in Japan for 15 years. He thinks the Christian presence is underreported for cultural reasons. He never had trouble finding a church.

I think the statistic is that about half of the towns in Japan have at least one church. One might say a similar thing about the US, that about half the towns have a place where Buddhists or Hindus or new agers in general gather.

More importantly, I think, is that the essential ideology of the vast majority of Japanese is what is sometimes called Nihonism, or the general belief in Japanese-ness. Japan, starting way back in the Yayoi era with the first infusion of Koreans, has spent the last two millennia absorbing every aspect of non-Japanese societies that it finds useful, from Chinese writing to American technology, and then politely eschews the rest. They even accept some of the trappings of Christianity, from celebrating Christmas to being married in Christian chapels. But embracing the salvation that only comes from Christ is a bridge too far, because that implies rejection of a major aspect of Nihonism, the Buddhist/Shinto amalgam that nearly everyone follows--not because they believe it, but because everyone else follows it, and group consciousness is essential to retaining Japanese-ness.

There were two times in Japanese history when Christianity had a chance to break through this. The first was in the late 1500s when up to 1/4 of the nation became Catholic, but the non-Catholics won the Battle of Sekigahara and Christianity went underground for the next 250 years. The second was in 1945, when MacArthur could have told the Japanese to become Christians, and they would have, just as Constantine did with the Romans in the 300s; instead, he pleaded for missionaries to come to Japan and convert them one by one, with the present situation the result. (My guess, and it's only my guess, is that MacArthur thought the Japanese were similar to the Filipinos he had known for decades, and would respond to such mission work en masse.)

How will Japan be brought to Christ today? I honestly don't know. God will have to do it in a way that is not our way, by thoughts that are not our thoughts.

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